


I ought to know you blind

by isoldewas



Series: carries [4]
Category: Legion (TV)
Genre: Codependency, F/M, blame all the anachronisms on Summerland's amazing tech, feat. an OC named Ben cause I binged all of MASH, why is oliver always the villain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:49:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27423001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isoldewas/pseuds/isoldewas
Summary: She can’t tell. She can’t fucking tell if he is. Kerry remembers the hurt, her ribs crushing around empty space, her arms that wouldn’t bend. And now she can’t tell if he’s on the other coast or not.Written for the Legion zine Memory Work.
Relationships: Cary Loudermilk & Kerry Loudermilk, Cary Loudermilk/Kerry Loudermilk, Kerry Loudermilk/OMC
Series: carries [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1381765
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	I ought to know you blind

“Then it dawned on me, I was just fighting myself and using their ribs to hurt my hands on.”  
-5.19 of mash 

“I ought to wear it better, I ought to know it now.”  
-so it goes, tamino

Kerry sees him crossing the street and drops her shopping bag. The carton of milk spills on the filthy pavement and the oranges roll under the passing car, and she can’t make a fucking move.

“Cary’s here?” There’s no introducing the subject matter, so Kerry just throws it out there. Oliver raises an eyebrow.

She can’t tell. She can’t fucking tell if he is. Kerry remembers the hurt, her ribs crushing around empty space, her arms that wouldn’t bend. And now she can’t tell if he’s on the other coast or not.

“He is,” Oliver says. 

“He’s consulting,” Melanie chimes in. 

Cary’s back in the city and no one said anything. _It’s Cary,_ she wants to go across the room and shake them. _It’s Cary. It’s me._

Oliver looks back to the map in front of him, case closed.

So Kerry goes to say hello to Ben on security duty, camera feeds flicking behind him on the screens. There’s a shape there, on the top left one, the one hooked up to the lab. The man keeps his back turned away from the camera, but Kerry knows the lines, the set of his shoulders hunched over a scary-looking contraption.

She can’t tear her eyes away from the feed. In black and white, the image of him is terribly, unnervingly familiar. Kerry can predict the next move: he’s going to reach for the pen on his right. Step closer. Turn his face to the camera and look up.

On Tuesdays, they always go to the same bar.

Sitting in an uncomfortable chair, not twenty minutes in, Kerry just wants to leave. She’s still waiting on her fries.

Tuesdays are never easy. Crowds still make her wary. It shocks her into a state, how good they all are, how they aren’t a threat. And then there’s Cary, sitting on the other side of the table, who she just wants to punch and leave. Who she wants nothing to do with. Kerry keeps sipping at her cream soda.

On her right, Benjamin throws his head laughing and she mimics that as best she can. She doesn’t want to look at Cary, but he won’t stop raising his hands in exaggerated motions, always right there.

“You don’t say!” he throws Melanie’s way, eyes locking with Kerry’s for a split second.

She turns to look at Oliver, at Ben and his stark green sweater, but Cary’s hands clutch on to her peripheral vision. He’s confident and incredibly loud. His voice is impossible for her not to hear: everything inside her has always been tuned to that exact frequency.

“Coffee,” she hears, his voice screechy around the word, “Doesn't work on me.” And that one kind of stings. That’s something that’s true for her too, and he’s flaunting that in the open.

She splits her fries with Ben to finish up faster and gets up.

Near the counter, Melanie catches up with her. “We’ve got it, don’t—” Her eyes are wide and intent on Kerry’s mouth. “You know, when Oliver and I split up last year—” _Oh._ That’s where this is going. Kerry cuts her off before she gets to the point.

“Mine wasn’t a breakup, Melanie.”

Kerry hopes her look is equally uncomfortable. Melanie shifts and withdraws, tapping Kerry on the shoulder before turning away.

She walks out of there, looping her scarf around her neck when the door opens behind her, and Cary walks out too. He’s taller than she is, that’s the thing. His coat suits him. He feels like an entirely different person than the one from eight years ago.

He looks at her like he knows things. She doesn’t think he’s allowed to do that. Kerry wants to get closer, to press a finger to his chest, and see if it’ll give. 

She wants to leave him cold and alone and hurting. That place Kerry’s trying to go back to, it doesn’t exist. She knows that by now. Cary’s all bone and blood if you cut him open. No magic to him, no remorse.

“You look cold,” he mumbles, everything about him reserved now. Even his loud hands are tucked neatly in his pockets. With any luck, he’ll pull a knife on her and this will be over. 

“I’m always cold,” she throws at him before getting away. 

She comes back home and throws shoes against the wall. In the morning, there’s a mission. 

For a split second before the gunfire, everything in her is aware: the time is slowing down, like she is making it so, bending it to her will. The familiar tension in every muscle, the electricity in the air. See, now this has always seemed reasonable to her. In the early days she used to imagine Cary there with her: scared shitless and out of his element. All of that fear, Kerry used to think, he took with him when he left.

Someone grabs her arm from behind, a spoiled angle of attack. Don’t they know by now, that she’s the one to fear here? Kerry turns around, a knife in her hand, and there he is, not even a soldier. Not even anything in his beige suit, with his glasses and his mousy gray hair. The man inches a step closer, his hand raised in the air, closing in. Kerry doesn’t think about his value to the mission. She can’t stop looking at his glasses. 

There's nothing there except for his scared expression when she blocks the punch and grabs him by the elbow. She hits him till he falls down, and then, her legs pinning him under her, Kerry hits him again. She can’t seem to stop, her knuckles coming up red.

When there’s a knife in her side, it dawns on her, slowly, feverishly. She’d forgotten. She’d let go of it just to fight him with both hands.

There’s some feeling in her right side. Other than that, she can’t get a read on anything. Even the air feels heavy, and when she tries to shake it off, it pushes her back down on the bed.

Cary’s there too. _Reading._

She’d told him to go but he stayed. Kerry has a plan: when she’s able to move, she’ll wait till he falls asleep on that couch. She’s going to walk up to him and punch him in the stomach. 

She fists a hand around the covers. There’s new blood in her veins. Kerry can feel it moving: foreign, raw, and exactly her type. Exactly her blood. That’s why he’s here. 

“You were hurt,” Cary said when she’d woken up. “I was there.”

“I still have your scars,” he says now, out of nowhere. “And I used to find bruises everywhere.”

“I hope they hurt—”

“I thought they were yours—” 

Bullshit. Kerry would know if her pain wasn’t just hers. Cary looks down at his book again. The thing is, she knows exactly what he’s hinting at; that phantom pain of losing half a person. He keeps shifting through the pages, not really paying attention to any of it.

“You could heal me by magic,” Kerry lets slip. She hears herself say the words but none of it feels very real, so she adds on. “You could let me disappear.” 

Cary arches an eyebrow and, if she could, she’d turn away. Kerry settles for closing her eyes, and that’s worse. She wants to be standing, dressed in her best suit, and ready to stab him.

She hears him shift in his seat. “I stole at you.” Cary says it like he’d said the words before.

Slowly, Kerry opens her eyes. There are lines across his face, more than on hers. But his limbs are all there, his body’s whole and unbroken. Maybe he got free from her. Maybe her loneliness was just freedom in reverse. 

She holds his gaze steadily. For a second he’s painful to look at. It’s right there, staring back at her from behind Cary’s eyes. It’s terrible and open and hers beyond doubt. But then he tilts his head back, and that open thing is gone. He’s just Cary again. The man who isn’t her anymore, so why would she try and pretend she knows what he’s getting at.

“Don’t start shit,” Melanie throws at her when Kerry’s back in Summerland. She wonders whether Melanie had this talk with Cary too, whether she walked up to him, stared him down and asked him to behave.

They’re working together now. The fact that back at the hospital Kerry's never gotten around to digging an elbow in Cary’s side apparently qualified them as civil. 

As she watches him rewire an array of Summerland’s machines, Kerry makes a list. His movements are slow and deliberate. His hands shake over the table, and he makes a fist to still himself. Kerry extends her fingers, makes a fist too. She’s never slow like this. There’s a split between them that, for eight long years, Kerry could only guess at. 

Where there used to be a place for her in him, there's other stuff. Melanie said he was a fan of boxing, and when Oliver mentioned his recently developed affinity for fine wine, Cary knew what he was talking about. Melanie also laughs at his jokes, squeezes his shoulder, and congratulates him on the job well done.

“Oliver told me he—” Cary sighs, “He thought you’d be the one to run.”

She knows exactly how Oliver would go about it: a sly smile, just for him and Cary, like, _that’s what I wanted._ He’d said that to her too, years ago, a slight air of disappointment about him.

“He thinks you’re invaluable,” Cary adds, looking up at her.

“Sure he does,” her mouth’s set in a hard line, unconvinced.

“You don’t trust people, do you?”

Kerry wants to dig an elbow in his side. _Are you fucking kidding me?_

Cary keeps crossing and recrossing wires, connecting them to the machine. He still does this thing with his hands. Like trying to explain, even when there’s no audience. Well, except for her. _Oh,_ she thinks. _That’s why he’s doing it._

There’s a place inside her where this means something. There’s a tether pulling at the dead things inside of her, stirring them to life. That’s how he used to communicate with her, his hands emphasizing the words back when his voice couldn’t carry inflection. Cary used to talk about everything, like everything was something, like he could get any point across if she’d only listen. That’s what she said to Oliver that night, eight years ago. “Cary talks with his hands.”

“And you don't,” Oliver drawled, his eyes unnerving and intent on her hand. Kerry’d clutched it into a fist, she’d hidden it under the table, but he saw. 

“That’s very interesting, Kerry.” She didn’t know then these words from him always meant death. When Oliver looked at her again, he’d smiled. 

It took them a day. It took Oliver and Cary a day to unmake her. In a lab, Oliver tied him to the operating table. Kerry wasn’t even in the room. She just felt cold all of a sudden. 

When she saw Cary next, he had a small cut on his chin. Kerry pressed two fingers to her chin, just to see him flinch. Nothing happened. She pressed again, digging into the bone now. He didn’t wince, he didn’t even look up. It didn’t hurt.

Kerry ran to him, pressed her hands to his chest, and still nothing happened. Kerry reached out, grabbed him by the wrist, and tugged him closer. His body leaned into the movement, his feet stumbled over each other as his elbow dug in her side. She hugged him, pressed her arms into his sides, crushed his ribs, and felt nothing. No remnants of pain, no imaginary bruises forming on her torso. Cary was standing in front of her and she had to look at him to know he was there. Same skin, same clothes. Only they were stuck outside each other now—

The machine makes a high-pitched sound, bringing Kerry back to where Cary’s staring at it in disbelief. 

It makes another sound, like an alarm this time, and Cary freezes. She knows it before he knows it. Kerry crosses the room at full speed and tackles him, bringing both of them to the floor. Cary locks eyes with her for a second before everything explodes.

“Consulting is a very dangerous job,” she hears him say, showing off the bruise on his forehead.

Kerry’s fifty today but her birthday cake says thirty. The whole evening no one congratulates Cary, so Oliver must have kept his mouth shut. 

The party’s at her apartment, and as people bring food and drinks Kerry begins to ease into the noise. Cary’s sitting in her favorite armchair by the window. He laughs at the jokes but sometimes he misses, not paying attention. Kerry keeps watching him from across the room, sipping on her gin and tonic. When she leans back on the wall, her shoulder aches. When they were digging the shards of the machine out of her back, he’d been there too, the red wound splitting his forehead. She winced. “I’m so sorry, Kerry,” he’d said. It was the first time Cary apologized in eight years. 

The cut of his suit is a couple of years out of fashion, but it suits him, in a way. If anything, Cary looks less out of place by being out of time. How very much like him, she thinks with no real no proof to back it up, to wear his age on display. He’s gray and fragile and nothing in particular. Kerry’s getting really sick of noticing him at every turn.

Benjamin comes up to her. “Here,” he says, his eyes bright, a pile of old vinyl records in his hands. He watches her carefully, as she takes the records from him, not sure what to do about it. “Thank you,” she manages.

She can feel Cary’s eyes on her too. She doesn’t like either of them like this. She likes it even less when Cary gets up.

Kerry goes to refill her glass before he approaches. She walks past the door and, for a second, Kerry considers it. She thinks, if she leaves now Cary won’t know why. He won’t know where. Only that’s nowhere near enough. Kerry rolls up the sleeves of her shirt, readying for a fight she knows he won’t give her.

“—music?” Cary says, vaguely gesturing to her record player, “You like—” He stutters when he looks up and Kerry’s right in front of him, “Music?”

“No,” she replies, all bite. Her mouth tastes bitter from the gin, from the word. 

“She just hates when it’s quiet,” Benjamin cuts in. 

Kerry’s eyebrows shoot up. She doesn’t dare blink.

Cary turns to her, eyes wider than usual and mouth half-open around his next sentence. She doesn’t need it. She’s going to kill Ben.

Kerry turns around and goes straight to her room. There’re coats on her bed as if they aren’t all living in the same building. She rolls her shoulder blades together and winces. The door closes behind her. 

It’s so obviously Cary. She knows that from his steps, from his breathing, from the way the air in the room suddenly feels electric. 

He gives her a small smile and looks around. It’s his birthday too. He’s half a century old today and it shows. Kerry crosses her arms. One day he’ll die and she won’t notice. Nothing in her will scream.

Cary picks up a book from the high shelf. He won’t be there in fifty years. Hell, he won’t be here in a month, she thinks as her nails dig into her skin. He opens the book on a random page and starts to read. _Get out. Get out, get out, it’s mine. You can’t be here._

Kerry wraps her arms around herself. She’s all bone and muscle too, fight and blood and violence wrapped up together. She can barely hold still. 

“I have a present for you,” he starts. Kerry arches an eyebrow at that. “I have— I wanted to—” Cary goes on, his voice low and soft around the edges. Where Kerry had to sharpen herself into all this, he’d gotten comfortable. Delicate, almost, with his unmarked hands and the glasses that would cost him his life in a fight.

Even now, he doesn’t know how to get to his point. Cary keeps glancing up at her, puts down the book. Kerry gets a distinct impression that she scares him shitless, the way she stands in the middle of the room, unblinking, unnerving even to herself.

Carefully, Kerry takes a step. She places a hand on his shoulder. “Happy Birthday.” She aims for dry, but her words come out a pitch higher than usual. “There,” she offers, almost soft. “Give your present and go—”

“I thought I’d leave—” he says, and Kerry doesn’t get to finish her sentence. The way his words dig a hole in her chest, she’s not sure she can breathe. Cary stares at her. _I thought I’d leave._ He means it as a gift.

 _Ben,_ she thinks all of a sudden. The way Ben looks at her, and Melanie’s red puffy face after her fights with Oliver. That’s what Kerry must look like right now. Weak and pathetic and stupid and she can’t stop. What happens next is as much on Cary, as it is on her. She throws herself at him. Her fists curl at the lapels of Cary’s suit, and her teeth flash near his face.

Next, Kerry catches him by the elbow, her other arm going to the neck at an angle, easy. She could snap him in half, she could break a bone. With very little effort, Kerry slams his body into the wall. Now that she has him there, it’s hard to know where to begin. _I thought I’d leave._ Her rage isn’t blind. She traced the pain to its source years ago. 

“You already left!”

So Kerry kicks him in the stomach, again, her left leg aiming for the hip. 

“Like you couldn’t run fast enough!” She tries to punctuate every word with a blow.

Kerry tilts her head up to see the impact, to see him flinch, but his face is blank. It scares her that Cary can remain blank when she’s finally all in, ready to draw blood. Suddenly, his hand is around hers, brutal against her skin, stronger than she anticipated. He lets go instantly, but Kerry’s caught it. She feels older by centuries. 

That old suit of his covers up most of his shape: in her mind, he’s terribly, uselessly weak. She shifts her hold on his arm, feels for the muscle underneath his clothes. This Cary must know how to fight. He must also know better than to be this pliant, so he’s _letting_ her.

Her hands press at his chest. He doesn’t look very breakable right now. His glasses are getting fogged up, and his mouth is slightly parted and it looks like it’s as defenseless as she’s going to get him. This is painfully familiar to her, almost convincing her that she could disappear, that his skin could break and swallow her whole. Cary places his hand against a scar on her ribs. _I still have your scars._

She plants a kiss in the corner of his mouth. And when that doesn’t work Kerry presses her mouth to his. She pushes against him at the hips, her chest, and her mouth, and none of it can bring him back. Her hand slips up, nails scratching against the skin on his neck and he winces. Kerry doesn’t. She doesn’t do anything, she stops.

It doesn’t occur to her until he turns his face away, that it doesn’t look like an attempt to reverse the science. Instead, it looks like the conclusion of all her stares across the room. Like she loves him and can’t do anything about it except this. Like her anger took a turn, and that’s where it decided to end up.

Her fingers look almost pale in this light. Kerry’s fingers around his arm, on his suit, and how is this for trespassing: Cary looks offended, he looks like she’s hurting him. Kerry uncurls her hand and they both breathe in again, in and out, in complete sync, which isn’t even supposed to happen anymore.

This feels all wrong. Kerry backs down.

While still catching her breath, she turns to look at Cary. He’s covered his face with both hands. It reads like guilt, like terror. It makes her want to fight him all over. It makes her want to get punched.

The rest of the party is a blur.

She kisses Benjamin, open mouth and open eyes. She doesn’t see Cary leaving, but he’s no longer there when they cut the cake. And then there’s only Ben left, smiling at her for too long and she’s thinking, _sure._ At least him, Kerry doesn't want to punch.

She quite likes his terrible, selfish hands and her hungry mouth that takes whatever little is there to offer itself up. Kerry kisses his jaw when she has a hunch that he wants her to. She relishes in being so close and not knowing. 

And through all of it, she keeps that terrible flicker of a feeling away from herself. Ben gets out of her apartment in the morning, fumbling with the pockets of his jacket and waving her goodbye with a smile that now seems permanently attached to his face, and Kerry still won’t acknowledge it.

How useless it had felt. How she placed a hand on Cary’s chest and tried to push herself there. How it was nothing but empty. It’s just a metaphor. It’s not a guarantee.

“I’m sorry. For hitting you.”

Cary’s slow, his ribs aching and bruised. For the first time, this knowledge doesn’t spark anything. Kerry’s just tired. He’s just there.

He looks up from the blueprints of Oliver’s latest machinery. It doesn’t look like the hitting part is what’s bothering him: he turns away and plants the palm of his hand right in the center of Oliver’s design.

It’s like studying herself in the mirror: the edge of the jaw, straight hair, the violence of teeth. But then, his violence is different from hers. He looks at her like she did something irreversible. And Kerry’s not going to stand there and wait for him to scold her for something she no longer believes. Kerry closes in, just to keep herself from shifting on her feet.

His hand reaches to her shoulder. It’s tentative and soft, a gesture meant to placate. Her mouth feels very dry, her arms won’t bend again. It’s nothing, it’s nothing. This will never be enough. On a whim, she slaps his hand away.

“I don’t want to have you!” She likes her cruelty. Like twisting a knife, he makes it so easy.

“I was you, having you is nothing!” Kerry inhales, cool air scratching at her throat. “Having you is worse.”

She doesn’t expect him to react, but he raises his hand. “Kerry,” he blurts out, grits his teeth. “It wasn’t good.” 

She stares him up and down. “I left because— I thought you’d—” Cary removes his glasses, pinches the bridge of his nose. “I didn't think you liked me very much.” 

It doesn’t hurt, it hardly even registers with her. 

“I took up too much space, and—” Cary keeps stumbling through the words. He gestures to her. “You would never have been this.” 

“Ugh,” she cuts him off, dismissive. 

“We got two lives out of one,” he offers as if proving a point. It’s math. Cary holds her gaze, his face open, and his words right there, between them. Doesn’t he know?

She remembers never having enough. How she barely had time to think, everything around just so overwhelmingly _Cary,_ before she even had the chance to make an impact. The unfairness, the ache in her chest, the way she used to press a finger to a bruise, just to see him flinch.

It’s just that— She ended up with even less somehow. That, he failed to account for. 

“You were my life.” Her voice is so soft Kerry’s not sure it’s hers. She didn't know she could do that. 

“And you left, and—” From the looks of him, Cary didn’t know either: he stares at her, different now. Burnt. As if it never _occurred_ to him. 

“I was— There was nothing special about me anymore.” 

And then Kerry’s done talking, but she keeps looking at his hands, thinking, _it’s you. It’s Cary, it's you, it’s you, it’s me, he’s me._ She’d missed it. Kerry examines the back of her hands. The scar tissue over her knuckles, the odd bend of her middle finger that hadn’t been set properly. She’d stumped everything in her that was his. She’d buried him over and over.

What Cary doesn’t say, what he is saying with everything but words, is _you're not alone now._ His shoulders slightly bent, his feet solid on the ground. Cary doesn’t dare speak it but it’s there.

“Stay here.” She’s the one to say it. She’s sick of burying him.

He doesn’t have a life here. He has nothing here but her. And Oliver, and Melanie, and a job if he wanted one. And her.

He smiles and Kerry can feel it, the same joy tugging at the corner of her mouth. There it is.


End file.
